were told that if we were going to fight, we were going to fight to win. So we decided that if we were going to go after him [the enemy], we were going to take his head off.

         Thus, many of the Vietnam War's principal shortcomings - incremental build up of forces, fascination with statistical measures of success, divided, service - oriented command and micromanagement from Washington -- were scrupulously avoided during this war.

         Another powerful set of lessons learned from Operation Desert Storm can be traced to America's humiliation during Desert One, the failed attempt to rescue the American hostages from Iran in 1979. The failure of the military at that time to have effective, deployable special operations forces capable of a successful rescue mission led to a considerable investment of resources and effort to remedy the problem. As a result, mature and flexible special forces were able to contribute to the success of Operation Desert Storm.

         Desert One also displayed a fractured chain of command and highlighted the existing shortcomings of planning and executing effective interservice operations. These problems manifested themselves throughout the early 1980s and helped lead to the Goldwater - Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986.

         The Grenada Operation in 1983 had a special relevance to Operation Desert Storm. The Deputy Commander of the Joint Task Force was then - Major General H. Norman Schwarzkopf. It is unlikely that the problems caused by the operational division of Grenada along service boundaries were lost on the future Operation Desert Storm commander. In stark contrast, Operation Desert Storm featured the first truly unified military operation under the firm control of the theater Commander in Chief ( CINC ), as required by the Goldwater - Nichols legislation.

         The 1983 - 84 military experience in Beirut was also marked by a disastrous fragmentation and ambiguity of command that contributed to the deaths of more than 200 Marines. Again, this fragmentation of command stands in contrast to the clearly established, direct lines of authority used in Operation Desert Storm, where orders traveled from the White House to the Secretary of Defense through the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staffs, to the military officer in charge of the operation, General Schwarzkopf.

         Finally, the fresh memory of Operation Just Cause in Panama in 1989 validated the use of overwhelming force to achieve limited military objectives. The value of this lesson was central to the approach taken in deploying the massive 550,000 - man force used to defeat Iraq.

         Just as Vietnam and subsequent operations were the points of reference for the U.S. military throughout the seventies and eighties, Operation Desert Storm will now be the yardstick against which the most significant military hardware and policy questions for the future will be measured. The instinctive question will no longer be " What did the failures of Vietnam teach us about this or that? " but rather " How well did we do against Iraq with this technology or with that doctrine? "

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